During the IDS® portion of our Level 10 Meeting™, our team constantly gets sidetracked by side conversations and unrelated tangents, leaving our most important issues unresolved. How do we stop this agenda drift?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Agenda drift during IDS® is a direct result of poor facilitation and a lack of focus. It happens when a team starts discussing a symptom of a problem and then chases every tangent that pops up, rather than identifying the root cause first. When you allow this to happen, you waste valuable time and leave the meeting with half-baked solutions that do not stick.

To kill agenda drift, you must strictly follow the three-step IDS® process. The first step is Identify. Do not allow anyone to start discussing or solving the issue until the actual problem is clearly defined in a single, concise sentence. If the team cannot agree on the root issue within a couple of minutes, you are not ready to solve it.

Once the issue is identified, move to Discuss. During this phase, everyone gets to state their view once. If a team member starts bringing up a secondary issue or a related story, the facilitator must call it out. Simply say that it is a separate issue and offer to add it to the bottom of the Issues List. This keeps the current discussion clean.

Finally, the facilitator must keep the team moving toward Solve. As soon as the discussion starts repeating itself, stop the talk and ask for a To-Do. If you let the team talk in circles, you are wasting time. Assign a clear, action-oriented To-Do and move to the next issue. Strong facilitation is about keeping the team on a straight path.